I was wiped out from work all week when I finally got around to watching Spectral (2016), always had it in mind and in fact have this idea to look up all the Netflix Originals that I havent watch yet, it felt like a good short film, the movie shows like they did a lot with little and fits perfectly a streaming movie. The movie follows Mark Clyne, a DARPA researcher sent into a war zone in Moldova and the movie picks up the war pace really quick without much explanation of who are the bad guys, it just gets to the point and I like that. The first contact scene with the enemy is this soldier who ignores orders to wait for backup, choosing to push forward and uses these advanced hyperspectral goggles to look around the ruined streets. He sees this swirling transparent figure and the entity just rushes right into him. The poor guy drops dead on the spot, because his internal organs are flash frozen and his eyes turn completely white. There is a lot of jumps between places withouth much explanation witch might be the most confusing part of the movie aside from the tech, all of the sudden we are at a research lab, where Clyne demonstrates a high powered laser, which instantly melts a huge block of ice. When a military official casually asks if they can test it on a living thing, Clyne just fires back by asking if there are any volunteers. That exact moment tells you everything you need to know about Clyne, because he is a man of science, who relies on his brain and is a man who prove things rather than follow unproven theories. Those first twenty minutes nail the risks this soldiers are taking on and the look of the movie too because for this spectral shapes to be perfectly notice there has to be dark ambient, and you end up just as confused and scared as the soldiers are without knowing wtf attack them and how to stop them.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2106651/
- Platform: NETFLIX
Rottentomatoes Rating
When you start thinking about the concepts that this movie touch on you start to realize how crazy it is and in fact is the only thing that keeps it alife during the draggy and slower moments, a lot of the characters are plain flat, but thats not a bad thing for a movie like this. When Clyne first shows up at the military base, the Delta Force soldiers get right in his face acting like a bunch of aggressive bullies. They treat him like a complete nerd, until their commanding officer gives a massive speech about how Clyne invented their protective gear. Aside from that, even Clyne suffers from a lack of development, jumping to the conclusion that the creatures are made of Bose Einstein condensate without much logical buildup. The rest of the squad members blend together into a faceless crowd of guys holding guns, and I literally could not tell you anything about their individual personalities. Sergeant Toll is one of the few exceptions, especially when the team hides in an abandoned factory and discovers two local children named Sari and Bogdan. Toll is the only soldier who actually talks to the boy, showing a softer side by asking what the entities are. We learn the deceased father of the kids protected them by pouring a ring of iron filings around the building, and the movie tries to force an emotional connection before the group has to abandon the safe zone and make a run for it. Young Bogdan gets killed by a ghost almost immediately, but I did not feel any emotional weight when the kid died because we barely spent ten minutes with him, so his death just felt like a fkn cheap trick.
The best part of the movie for me is the action, there is no drama here or time to grow characters, they throw you right into it, especially the part where the Delta Force team goes into a building to grab a missing squad. Clyne is the one who created the goggles that could detect the motion of the entities but not fully see them, so he takes this massive old television style camera that can actually capture the entities and reverses the polarity so it acts like a giant spotlight. Now not only can he see them but every other soldier around him can too, something they just do not explain much and it just works. The team eventually finds one guy still alive, and if you have seen a lot of sci fi movies there must be a reason why he was still alive. A soldier named Comstock is hiding underneath an overturned ceramic bathtub, and that detail ends up mattering a lot later on. The visual effects look incredible when the entities phase right through the heavily armored troops, leaving them frozen and dead in an instant. They have this trace that follows them almost like in the Tron movies. The movie does develop itself as after each scene there is a new clue or a new weapon, it feels like you are going through levels. After they try to escape from the building where Comstock was, their trucks get bombed so they have to run into the factory, where they hit the lottery without knowing it. They meet the kids, learn the basic concept of why the factory is surrounded by iron, where everything started and who their dad was, and it all starts to fall into the right places. That sequence leads into a standoff in an old courtyard with a busted up water fountain, where the soldiers lose their portable light and are completely blind. Massive tanks roll in with giant searchlights mounted on top, and I was amazed when one of the ghosts charges straight into a tank. The ghost fails to pass through the thick ceramic armor, just bouncing off while denting the metal, which proves these things actually have physical limitations. Its like every encounter is a new experiment, a new clue, and thats what makes the movie interesting, aside from the spectral concept that I have never heard before. Then a rescue helicopter shows up and it turns out the rotor wash actually pushes the entities back, which is such a smart touch. Clyne grabs and smashes glass jars full of iron shavings right then, so the helicopter wind blows all that metal dust straight into the ghosts, breaking up their forms just enough for everyone to get out. My main problem with the movie is still that a lot of this tech feels like it was created just to look cool rather than make any sense, but the constant progression of new clues and new ways to fight the entities kept me interested.
The story itself is pretty simple, and you can tell it borrows a lot from classic science fiction and action movies. The soldiers getting overwhelmed by an enemy they do not understand reminded me of Aliens right away, but most important an enemy they cant see so then it gets closer to Predator. Clyne, Madison, and Captain Cabrera monitor the squad through helmet cameras from an armored vehicle out side of the building. When things go sideways, Clyne practically begs Madison to pull the team out, but she resists because she does not want to walk away without a sample, until Cabrera finally calls the evacuation himself after he realize nobody is getting out alife if they stay and fight. That is basically Ripley screaming at the lieutenant to pull the marines out and it works very well here, because it shows how stubborn humans can be when they center into an idea, specially an unproven theory. The movie also shares a ton of DNA with Battle Los Angeles, with that gritty boots on the ground feel of soldiers trying to survive a chaotic urban invasion, but for me it had a place and memories from my childhood, it takes things a step further by mixing in the high tech spiritual warfare of something like Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, that was my very first movie ever, one I would never forget but back then I was more into music. This Spectracl has the same theme of combining spectral phantom enemies with heavy military hardware, like on the opening where the soldier looks down his sights at the ghostly anomaly, and if the spectral touch them its game over. It even feels very Mcgyver when Clyne tells them to bring all their gear and he will find a way to build them an arsenal, like the heroes are forced to build custom plasma weapons and energy packs to fight ghosts but without explaining what they hell they doing, the movie just make their masks and weapons look cool.
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